Abstract
The aim of this paper is to provide a review of the main roles HEIs can play in rural areas. A longitudinal case study about the civic engagement of the University of Macerata - UNIMC (Italy) is presented, by assessing its attempt to fulfil its third and fourth mission through the application of the Quadruple Helix and 3 Model and by implementing the Civic University’s dimensions. Furthermore, these aspects have been investigated through the university-business collaboration and the community-academic-collaboration frameworks. More specifically, the paper focussed on UNIMC’s commitment at a local level analysing its involvement in local and international projects for place and agri-food product marketing, place branding and rural development, promoted by a research team within the Department of Education, Cultural Heritage and Tourism.
Highlights
In the last decades, universities have become increasingly more engaged in the civic society, mainly in the rural areas where Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have built relationships with local stakeholders and worked on co-creation activities to achieve sustainable development objectives (Trencher et al 2013; Cavicchi et al 2013)
Findings and discussion In the following table (Table 3), the activities carried out by the University of Macerata as a part of the projects previously described are hereby compared to the civic university’s dimensions, in order to verify whether UNIMC can be considered a civic university
Its attitude to work and build a relationship with public and private stakeholders belonging to the Quadruple Helix is coherent with what Goddard & Kempton (2016) described as a civic university: the university achieved it through the combination of teaching and action research in order to face context-based challenges with the will to train “well-rounded citizens as graduates”
Summary
Universities have become increasingly more engaged in the civic society, mainly in the rural areas where Higher Education Institutions (HEIs) have built relationships with local stakeholders and worked on co-creation activities to achieve sustainable development objectives (Trencher et al 2013; Cavicchi et al 2013). It is important to observe how universities may combine global scientific discoveries to local co-production and exchange of knowledge (Charles 2016): as Goddard et al (2016) recommend, the knowledge provided by the traditions and the values of rural communities should be considered when talking about sustainable development and innovation, as culture is part of the societal areas which the university could contribute to (Goddard et al 2016) This is only one example of the many new roles of universities that were recently outlined by policy strategies for education and research, such as Europe 2020 (European Commission 2010) and that are central to the debate on the new Horizon Europe Research programme. In the same academic year, 467 people were employed at UNIMC, including full and associate professors and research fellows (MIUR 2020)
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